On these pages you will find information on and related to the IT system at the Department of Mathematics at UiB. The various articles are shown in chronological order, as opposed to any reasonably logical order. You may browse through everything by scrolling down this home page. Or one of the following may help you find what you want:

If the information you are looking for is related to one of the tags in the right margin, click on that tag and browse through the resulting posts.

If you have a keyword for the information you are looking for, fill your keyword into the search box. You will then find all of our pages containing the keyword. Most of the posts here are in English, so search for “printing” rather than “utskrift”.

These pages are not a substitute for the helpdesk BRITA! Official support of the IT-system is given by IT-avdelingen. If the system is broken in any way, you should contact them, through Issue Tracker or by phone 55584700.

If you have a general problem which is not dealt with on these pages, then leave a comment to this message describing the problem as good as you can. We will then post your problem as an open problem on this page. With a little luck someone will know a solution to the problem.

The most stable wireless connection at the department has SSID “eduroam”. Log in as brukernavn@ansatt.uib.no or @student.uib.no and empty domain name.

Authentication should be set to “Protected EAP (PEAP)”.

Guests from other universities may be able to connect to eduroam as well if their home institution is a member of the eduroam network. Otherwise employees can create guest accounts of the sort “kurskonto”. These do not work on eduroam, but they work on the wireless net with ESSID UiB.

To print from a Macintosh running OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), follow these instructions. When you get to the point where you are asked to name the print queue (“kø”), refer to this list to get the names of the printers in the department. For example, the queue for the printer “Emma” in room 532 is “Mi09_emma” (without the quotation marks).

You may remember earlier times when we had to use the “Samba” protocol for printing. Now it is much easier!

The Network Manager program is most likely running on your Linux box. You communicate with it by clicking the symbol with two computer-screens somewhere on the toolbar. It might be wise to reboot the machine after filling in the relevant information in Network Manager before trying to enable VPN. For VPN to work you need the network-manager and network-manager-pptp program packages. See also https://studentwiki.uib.no/tiki-index.php?page=vpn_ubuntu

Every employee can create a guest account at the wireless net for one day, three days or one week on the tjinfo webpage . Remember that guests logging in via the wireless net must enter username of the form username@gjest

Alternatively, if you log in to sebra.uib.no you can create a kurskonto. This kind of account gives access to both stationary machines and to the wireless net. In this situation guests logging in via the wireless net must enter username of the form username@kurs

If you want remote access to web-pages that are only available from the local network then you may use the university’s web-cache. Information about this is found at ITA Be aware that for example gmail will not work behind this proxy.

Karl Ove Hufthammer has created an unoffical LaTeX document class for Master’s theses at UiB, which is used by most of the statistics students. The document class and the (very unfinished) documentation can be found at /usr/local/share/texmf/tex/latex/mi.uib.no/uib-mi-master/.
Karl Ove says: Feel free to use it!

For Linux users there is a LaTeX document class at the department called mi-brev. Type texdoc mi-brev in a Linux terminal window to view the documentation for this class. It can also be used for private letters and for faxes. (It should also be possible to copy the class to a compatible TeX system on MS Windows or OS X.)

[Update: The article below was written in 2007. While it is hopefully still correct, it is now perhaps better to use the “eduroam” wireless network instead, see this article. SAS]

The university’s wireless net has SSID UiB. Once you have conncted to the wireless net and opened a browser, a dialog box will pop up. Fill in username and password, and you should be able to browse the net, use ssh, print etc. (See separate post on printing.) WARNING: Guests with kurskonto have username of the form username@kurs

You may want (or need) to connect to the VPN (“virtual private network”). Here the difficult part is that your username is user@ansatt.uib.no for employees, and something analogous for students. Currently the gateway vpn-ansatt.uib.no works for employees (vpn-student.uib.no for students).

Linux: Macaulay2 (including Schubert2!) is part of the standard distribution, at /usr/bin/M2. This may not always be the latest and greatest version, so if you need that, ask Stein Arild or Jan-Magnus for directions.

It appears that there are at least three ways to set up printing. Two of them require VPN to be set up, the third works when you are connected to the wireless net without having set up VPN. One of them is “the Microsoft way” and the other two more Unix-like. Remember to check that the papersize is correct after having set up the printer!

If you have a guest who has his own laptop with him/her, you can establish a temporary account for him/her that lets him or her connect to the internet via our VPN wireless network. Go to https://tjinfo.uib.no/nettkonto to do this.

The command “ssh” establishes a login on remote machines. For example the command

ssh alfred

will log you onto the server alfred. (From alfred you have access to your personal web-pages.)

If you use ssh (or scp or sshfs) a lot it will be convenient to use automatic autentification. The command “man ssh” will display information on howto do this. More detailed information will follow later. (If you have a good recipie on howto do this, please leave a comment.)

The commands “rsync” and “scp” allow you to copy files to remote servers. For automathic autentification see the post about remote login from linux machines. Please leave a comment if you have questions about this.

Storage outside your home directory can be used to share files with others. Moreover, if you need a lot of storage space (more than 6 gigabytes), then your home directory is not big enough.Read the rest of this entry »

It is possible to login from outside the university by ssh to login.uib.no. Once inside login.uib.no, you may ssh further from there, e.g. to your department workstation or a computation server (please don’t run heavy tasks on login.uib.no).

For employees the outgiong server is smtp.uib.no and the incoming server is imap.uib.no. The LDAP server (online address book for all employees and students) is ldap.uib.no, with base DN dc=uib,dc=no and port number 389.

Very useful if you use Thunderbird as your e-mail client. Apple’s Mail.app and probably many other mail programs can also make use of this.

There are many editors to chose from. Many people prefer Emacs. If you want Emacs to access remote files it will be an advantage to install one of the newer versions of Emacs.Read the rest of this entry »